


the worth of a forfeiture

by CopperCaravan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Fenera Mahariel, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 09:16:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7678819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For zevwarden week, day four: "I failed to kill you, so my life is forfeit." Zevran finds a new place for himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the worth of a forfeiture

In the beginning, Mahariel’s face is unreadable—he knows her distrust, her anger, her frustration.

Save her glaring, all other expressions are reserved for everyone else, which is truly a shame for he is quick to notice just how expressive and lovely her face can be. He glimpses her sly grin when she and Morrigan whisper on the road. He listens to her laugh, her teeth gleaming unholy in the light of the campfire. He sees her smile, soft and kind, when her hound curls up on top of her feet in the evenings.

But one day, he makes her smile. A joke about the windmill in Redcliffe. She doesn’t mean to, he knows, because she covers her grin with her hand as quickly as she realizes she is laughing. He takes that opening, however, unsure if there will be another unguarded moment between them.

“Were you going to kill me?”

She purses her lips, lets her eyes narrow and wander toward the fire. “No,” she says. “I suppose I never was.” She brings her fingers to her temple, runs a smooth, curving line down the side of her face, and Zevran feels the ghost of those fingers along his own tattoos. “I was homesick.”

It isn’t what he’d expected—neither the admission nor the familiarity. He is homesick too.

“You could go,” she says, “if you want.”

He watches her face—for dishonesty, for malice, for anything. Much, much later, he will look back on this moment and know there was _something_ —hesitance, perhaps, or worry—but for now, he finds no reason to doubt her. And that is exceptionally strange.

“I think I will stay,” he says. Then he clears his throat and adds, “For a while, at least. Much harder for the Crows to kill me while I’ve got company.”

~

He’d saved her life. They all know it, but what matters is that Mahariel knows it.

He doesn’t particularly want her to die, no—she is the one thing standing between him and House Arainai, after all—but he’d certainly not been planning to leap between her and a blade. He is as surprised as she is.

She stitches him up and mends his greave as best she can and neither of them say a thing. The wound is not _so_ deep, no, though it could’ve been; had he not been there to take it, it likely would’ve proven fatal.

He asks her, in not so many words.

Once, that night, he stands and says, “I will get more firewood.” They both know it is a test; in his condition, he would not make it very far alone, never mind defending himself should the Crows come to collect his debt. She nods, and if he was able, he could leave. She’d let him go. He believes that.

And again, when his leg has healed, he approaches her in the evening. “Warden, we need wood.”

Only when she nods her head, says “Be careful, Zevran,” do either of them know it was a test. He doesn’t leave, but he could. He believes that too.

~

He fears he has made a mistake.

A _fun_ mistake, a very _enjoyable_ mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

As they pack up to move the camp, Zevran catches her by the elbow, tips his head toward the far end of the clearing, and watches the others watching them.

“Last night...” he begins, but it sounds all wrong, feels flat and far too mundane for her. He starts again, hand still gripping her elbow, memories of her lips, her tongue, her hands playing in the back of his mind. “What is it you expect from me, Mahariel?”

_Warden._ He should have called her _Warden._

“Are _you_ expecting something?”

_No_ , he thinks immediately. Expectations are not something a Crow can have. And yet. “Do you think I would ask more of you than you are willing to give?”

“Do you think I would ask more of you?”

He doesn’t, and that is perhaps part of the problem. “What if I still wish to leave?”

“Do you?”

_Not particularly._ “Are you going to continue to answer all my questions with more questions?”

“Are you?” She smirks—a menace, she is—and he can’t help his own lips turning up, just a bit, as well.

She removes his hand from her arm, brushes her thumb over his knuckles. “You aren’t a prisoner here,” she says. “You’re a friend. And you can go—or stay—if you want.”

Perhaps he needn’t worry then, that she will get too attached. Perhaps his mistake is his own, and perhaps he will make it again.

~

He does not ask her again. There is no need.

He makes her an offer instead: a token, tarnished with age and witness to every right and wrong he has committed since he truly became what he is—what he was—a Crow.

She holds the earring up to the light; it doesn’t glitter, no, but golden it is, all the same.

“What does this mean, Zevran?”

“I could go, if I wanted.” He could. If he wanted. But he doesn’t.

~

“We could go home, Zevran.”

He knew it was coming—a reckoning—though he didn’t expect an offer, a choice, a way back. He _had_ expected Taliesen, however; the man has always had a love for the dramatic. And perhaps Zevran had hoped for a real goodbye, whatever it entailed.

Mahariel is silent at his side and when he looks at her, for an answer, her face is as unreadable as it was that first day. At first, panic builds in his stomach; it is as though everything has been reset, as though nothing has changed—

“Mahariel?”

—when she looks at him, though, her face is as expressive and as lovely as it has ever been.

_You could go, if you wanted._

The Crows offer many things: shelter, protection, reputation, all manner of pleasures to be lost in. But he knows all too well that these things must be paid for, with his life, his freedom, and once again, his _amor_.

“I could,” he says, “if I wanted. I do not.”


End file.
